I was born in Boston and trained in Archaeology in Jerusalem, and I've spent most of my career writing and thinking about the politics and contemporary meanings of archaeological discoveries. After completing a series of books about the history of Archaeology in the Middle East, I teamed up with my good friend and colleague Israel Finkelstein to see what we could accomplish in the re-construction of modern views of biblical history and the ancient societies in which the Hebrew scriptures arose. We hope that our theories stimulate thinking and reflection about the origins of the Judeo-Christian tradition. No less important, they offer an example of the kind of far-reaching archaeological transformation of our conventional view of the past that is now affecting modern understandings of nearly every historical period, in nearly every region of the world.